News

I thought I’d jump on real quick and fire off a news update on the sites. As is my way, I’ll start off with some self-defensive history.

Roll-back to a few weeks ago and the one month XBox exclusivity on Dawnguard, the first Skyrim add-on/expansion/whatever you want to call it, was due to expire. Many expected Bethesda would release it for the PC there and then. But they didn’t. In fact, Pete Hines coyly came out and said “We have not announced Dawnguard for any other platform, nor given any timeline for any such news. If we have any news, i promise i'd tell you”. So Dawnguard was an unknown.

Around this time of the year I tend to take a trip to Zakynthos in Greece with old housemates and past university friends. I’ve done so for the past 4 years now, so when they said they were going again this year I left it to the last minute to decide if I would go. With Dawnguard’s release up in the air, I booked my tickets and went and had a merry old time (thanks for asking), with my middle finger in the air to Dawnguard until I returned. Then Dawnguard middle-fingered me back :(

Without so much of a whisper, Bethesda released Dawnguard on Steam 4 or 5 days ago and lots of people who’d moved on from Skyrim came back, and they were hungry to see what mods had been made in their absence. And that’s when the problems hit. Not only was I away on holiday, but we were literally half-way through rolling out our new download system, so it was a bit like Bethesda pulling our pants down in gym class without knowing we were going commando that day. No fault of their own, of course, it’s the wacky world of Bethesda PR and they’ll do things how they want, and I won’t begrudge them that. However it meant that we had a huge 30% influx in traffic smashing the hell out of our download and database servers whilst we were half way through bringing out a piece of non stress-tested new code. The servers went parp, I went parp, and I also got hit with a nice $5,000 bandwidth overage bill to boot as well. We pushed over 1200 TB of bandwidth last month. I had to look up what 1000 terabytes is. Apparently it’s a Petabyte. New Nexus record, anyway!

So it’s been all hands on deck since then. I returned home about 2 hours ago after a flight back through the night, on zero sleep, and I’ll get this fixed as soon as possible. I’ve responded to a lot of the emails (especially to premium members having problems) but please understand, I’ve got about 3,000 unread messages from the past 2 weeks so if you don’t get a response to your “Why doesn’t it work” email, it’s because I’ve got about 2,000 more of the same email from other people! I’ve just sent in a request for an additional 2 US file servers to lighten the load on these, increase the download speeds and hopefully stop any of the connectivity issues that have plagued the servers in the past 5 days. The coders are busy working on tweaking everything as best they can.

The new download system is taking a back seat for the time being until we can get things back to decent functionality again. I’ll cover what we’re doing in more detail soon, but in a nut-shell, normal members are going to get download manager support but the total capped bandwidth will remain, premium members will be able to multi-thread their downloads and hopefully, if all goes to plan, maximise their full internet connection speed to download files much better than before. And NMM will do it all for you, if you use NMM.